


Asphodel

by StormBlue



Series: The Blood Archives [5]
Category: Warhammer - All Media Types, Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: Afterlife, Asphodel - Freeform, Death, Ghosts, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Multi, Mythology References, Other, Parallels, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:00:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27660362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormBlue/pseuds/StormBlue
Summary: Only in death does duty end. A catechism that Vigilance quickly discovered was no longer so true. Life and death was no longer so simple, nor was it just reality and the Immaterium. Another place exists. A sort of...in between.A spin off series that takes place directly after chapter twenty four of To Serve and continues the story of Vigilance. Contains a lot more references to Mephiston's lore, including now dead characters he's interacted with. Shot through a healthy dose of mythology for good measure.
Series: The Blood Archives [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1653487
Comments: 4
Kudos: 2





	1. Limbo

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like to interact with me or see more of my wips and content, feel free to follow me here: https://twitter.com/StormBlueStudi1
> 
> Canon characters mentioned so far are Mephstion, Antros, Rhacelus and Vode. The OCs are credited and belong to my friends down below at the end of the chapter.
> 
> As this is a spin off series meant to flesh out more about Vigilance and Mephiston's past, this isn't needed to understand To Serve, but certainly would help. ;)

As always, Elysmaldus was awash with warm ash the moment he exited the Real and stepped onto the ravaged river delta. It tugged at his cloak and rippled the purity seals that still clung to his armor. Perhaps once they meant something. Now they were the old mutterings of Gods and arcane sigils meant to placate spirits. In this he was little different than his environment. Bone white armor blending in so well with the surrounding ash it was as if he were birthed from it. And perhaps he was.

But the young woman in his arms was not. She was dead, pulled from Reality just moments ago. Their alliance was sealed the moment she took his hand, her soul going with him to this realm of dust with hardly any idea of what was to happen. Her body, bloodless and inert, was left behind. 

What she looked like now was, perhaps, open for interpretation. Such was the ways of this realm. Behind her head drifted a fat disk of blood surrounding her corpse pale face, which had grown plainly handsome in death. A halo, if he was to give it a name. Elysmaldus did not miss the resemblance to the dead Angel and wondered if that was somehow purposeful, but the likeness ended there. In death she had lost one augmented leg, but here both were gone now, replaced by billowing smoke and two desiccated limbs that were little more than flesh and bone. Her arms were intact however, but they were not alone. Silvery, skeletal arms floated at her side along with her bare augments, both clasped in front of her as if in prayer.

He looked up and continued on. 

Once, this had been a mighty river of black water swelling with souls ready to cross over, but over the vast hundreds of millennia it had grown shallow and then completely dry. Where the river still existed, particularly as it forked off towards the east and west, were places not even Elysmaldus dare to go most times. In truth the entire realm was this old river bed, leading almost endlessly to the north and south. The banks to the east and west, as with the forks, the warrior did not go for good reason. That left him with thousands upon thousands of miles of drifting ash flows and solid stone the color of bone and death to call his own. Monoliths emerged in and out out of the dust, dragged along by massive material chains that vanished somewhere in the vault of the firmament. All of which flickered with roughly hewn runes and sigils that the wonderer did not bother to try and read. Once they had meant something to a long dead people, but now they were remnants of language to be used only by the ghosts they came with. 

And indeed there were many of those. They were almost indistinguishable from the piles of dust or the billowing wind save for their faces. Almost always humanoid and untwisted. Placid things, really. The realm itself was one of dull, almost colorless peace. Somber but not depressing. Ambient, but not bright. Dim, but not entirely colorless either. It made for an excellent realm in which the forgotten and the defiant often found themselves in. Sometimes they spoke. Sometimes he listened to what he could or wanted to. Most times their languages were too old but Elysmaldus still scribbled their words onto the parchments lining his armor. 

More often than not the winds picked up and drowned out all other sound. This was perhaps the greatest of differences between here and Reality was that wind. It was not physical, but rather a wave of sound and emotion that rang with the clattering of distant bells, howls that bled in from the Immaterium or snatches of conversation from Reality. Vaguely, he heard Mephiston’s voice harking over the arrogant tones of a Necron lord. The chatter of bolters. The solid, bloody slap of Bellerion striking Damos upside the face. Even the confused screaming of blood thralls. All of this and worse before the gale died away and he was left with a peaceful silence once more. 

Cresting a massive dune in the lee of the gale, Elysmaldus found someone waiting for him atop of an outcropping of black stone. Diurniel, like himself and the woman in his arms, appeared very different than he did in Reality. Divested entirely of flesh, the armor he wore was totally hollow save for the thousands and thousands of lavender blossoms forever burning in his torso, creating a thick, fragrant smoke that fingered trough the heavy rents in his armor. Somehow he looked even more bestial and otherworldly than he had before Elysmaldas had placated him, but all of the hostility was gone now. Replaced by the same solemn mood that forever resided over this place. 

Even so, the chaplain seemed sad to see her. Vigilance had her eyes closed and not once had the woman tried to resist as he had. She’d been ready to die for a while now and it showed. Moving aside, he let the white warrior rest her insubstantial corpse upon one of the flat expanses of rock and studied her slowly. It was an old practice now. Older than anything in this realm currently, but Elysmaldus still gingerly opened her dry mouth, peering inside. As was always the case, no coin for passage. 

He shook his head. The river had not needed to be crossed even before he’d come along, but the impressions of this place’s antiquity still made their mark. Had he come sooner perhaps he would have been given a name from such times, but those were things mostly lost even to him. Even so, the symbolism remained. He only needed to look at Diurniel and the chaplain was kneeling to retrieve a bundle of something he had stored behind the altar. 

Asphodel flowers, their tall, pink-white stalks in sharp contrast to the black stone and Vigilance’s red and blood stained linens. The skeletal arms that drifted at her flanks gently grasping, pulling them against her torso even as her true arms remained motionless. Diurniel carefully arranged the rest around her body as if they were preparing to lower her into a grave. Instead, he lifted her head and whispered. 

“Constance Valdoria.” 

Her name, her real name, woke her immediately. The woman’s eyes, as silver blue as they had been in life, stared up in confusion at the grey skies. Then her face slowly followed, twitching. Totally bloodless, her lips were working, struggling to form words. 

“That…that was my name, wasn’t it?” Constance’s voice was a raspy whisper.

“Yes.” Diurniel rumbled comfortingly. “You don’t need to hide anymore, child.”

“So I am gone.” Her true arms loosened from their rigor mortis grip, thumbing at one of the blooms. “I’m dead.” After a moment the bloody halo above her crown flickered. “I’m…I’m so sorry. I left Patience behind. I never got to speak to Rhacelus again. I didn’t even get to explain anything to the scholiast.”

Silently the chaplain lit a fire beneath her, shaking his head. “All of us live with regrets. It is why we are here, child. We did not do enough evil to prompt being dragged into the Warp, nor did we feel we deserved to be at the Emperor’s side. We are in Limbo. But, perhaps, you have duties yet to perform.”

Both the chaplain and Elysmaldus stepped back and watched as the flames, as pink as rock salt, crept over her body. Constance neither screamed nor showed any sign that she was in pain, but it did silence her words. Both Astartes prayed quietly. One was purely silent. Elysmaldus always was. To Diurniel he appeared different in this realm too. 

Where the white warrior had only shown up in Reality wearing an ancient mark of power armor from a bygone era before the Primarchs, he now stood covered in a panoply of strange arcane. Not the sort that one would find in the Librarius, but…it was hard to describe. The cape was no longer plain, but stitched with complicated designs in gold. Particularly that of geometric knots woven in perfect symmetry around the borders as if meant to be followed. Hung from his armor were outdated looking cruciform shapes made from old wood or tarnished silver, strung on rosettes or on chains by themselves. Censers and incense were perhaps the only tools Diurniel were familiar with, but the warrior was most certainly not a chaplain either. Not to mention what was being burned in them wasn’t the sacred discs he used. Sage, lavender and other dried herbs smoldered in bundles or went unlit in pouches. Herbs that he was aware likely had not existed in some form for several thousand years. 

What had struck the chaplain the most was the warrior’s weapon. It was not the heavy iron flail that had been used against him in their scuffle in the chapel. That was there too, slung at Elysmaldus’s right hip. It was the sword at his back. A massive claymore with a wide blade that was not at all made of metal, but pure, solid amethyst. Not the color, but the true crystal, hardened and sharpened to a keen edge by means Diurniel could not even begin to imagine, marbled with veins of pink rock salt. It was a weapon that not just slew demons, but cleansed them as well. Nullifying the stuff of the Warp to the point they faded from existence entirely. nor did the weapon seemingly exist in his version of Reality. At least, that is what Elysmaldus let him know. For the warrior never spoke. Could not speak through any methods Diurniel was familiar with. Mere touches of the hand were almost always enough, bare souls exchanging information through pure emotion. After a while he’d gotten used to it. 

He saw Elysmaldus shiver and then stand, reaching an ivory gauntlet into the flames. They extinguished at his touch, the heat having burned away what few attachments the woman had to the living. Her true name was laid bare as a sigil that briefly smoldered on her chest before going out, leaving a smudge of charcoal. The fine work linens she wore were a more appropriate form of dress for death, delicate and lacy but still so very red. Not with blood, but in color. Still the skeletal arms floated at her side, forever grasping at the flowers and fumbling weakly at their petals. Her legs, completely stripped of flesh and burnt to a clean silver, remained still on the stone. Her back was hollow much like how Diurniel’s whole body was, exposing the clean gleaming silver of her spine. Her face, while bone white like the warrior’s armor, was no longer bloodless and sunken. Still handsome and framed by that drifting halo of blood that seemed to flicker with her emotions. Her eyes were closed and she did not wake again even after the last wisp of smoke dissipated. 

In the updraft created by the fire, a veil had formed, thin and ethereal and the color of old blood. It settled across her body, partially obscuring her from view. It would be a while before she was ready to wake again. That she had woken to the sound of her true name at all spoke plenty of the woman’s will. 

“She should be with the Emperor.” Diurniel pointed out, mindfully reading Elysmaldus’s mind for him. 

Amused, the white warrior shook the other’s shoulder, scattering blooming embers. For a moment the chaplain was stiff and then he nodded. 

“So I see. You gave her a choice then.”

Another nod. 

“…I saw into her mind, when I lifted her head. She saw too much. Knew too much. It’s no wonder she hid from everyone. Even her name.”

Elysmaldus looked at him. Diurniel was a chaplain of the Blood Angels, often given over to roiling sermons and strings of reverence, but he seemed honestly despondent over what the woman had left behind. He had never known Constance before but the touching of bare souls tended to shatter those barriers. And indeed he knew the same of her now as Diurniel did. Nearly weighed down with it in fact, as he had climbed through the ash to get here. She had a lot in her heart and it would indeed be a while before the woman formally known as Vigilance would be ready. 

But, for now, they had a duty to perform. 

Exchanging a look that Diurniel understood immediately, they rose from the funeral plinth and turned. Rising up and out of the ash many yards beyond was another stone, all red and gold and as sharp and long as a sword blade. Yanking it along was a series of thin gossamer chains that twanged inaudibly from the vault of the sky, firecracker bright despite the lack of an obvious sun.

Elysmaldus was the first to dismount the stone, dropping nearly a hundred feet as the ground vanished under his feet, dragged back towards the emerging stone as if it were the precursor to a tidal wave. Diurniel soon followed, deep purple smoke billowing out before him like a cape, a solid black mace soon forming in one open palm. The staff no longer resembled a croxius at all, but something older. More brutal. He went lightly from foot hold to foot hold in a way that seemed to ignore most laws of physics but by then Elysmaldus had already hit the ground at a sprint. 

Rearing up almost fully now, the spear of rock was revealed to be more like that of a hallowed out trunk shaped vaguely like an Astartes battle barge albeit on a much smaller scale not even a hundred feet tall. Playing host to blooming crystalline structures as red as blood and yet more ghosts that seemed to treat the void as a sort of home…

Or a gateway. For indeed it had no bottom or back, gaping instead into a misty, forlorn scene beyond that struggled to decide what it truly wanted to be. Diurniel shot in ahead of him and swung. Swaths of ghosts vanished in the weapon’s cruel arch, but some yet still fumbled at him with insubstantial hands and feet. Few could actually harm him, but if they were not cleared out they could very well end up in the realm beyond when they passed through. And so Diurniel uttered words that he had only learned from coming to this realm, still looping his mace in a complicated pattern as Elysmaldus slowed to a stop. 

With very little effort the white warrior withdrew his amethyst sword, the venerable weapon flashing with strange light as it went to its owners hands. Pulled tight at the apex of emergence, the gossamer threads holding up this towering, hollow gateway resisted but only for a moment at a single swipe from the sword. Shattering in shards of opalescent glass, Elysmaldus was forced to shield himself as they rained down upon him, fracturing perfectly all the way up into the firmament and then the gateway jerked to a halt. 

Uttering in annoyance, the ghosts that previously been harassing Diruniel began to turn on Elysmaldus, but then thought better of it. Beyond their colorless form, the realm beyond the mist became solid but only enough to see where it led. Before them, the two Astartes saw the inside of the Blood Caller. Particularly, the room where Patience’s parents had been slain. 

The chaplain muttered something the other knew was private. The ghosts who had been hosted by Diurniel’s savage phantom had finally severed their tethers and allowed themselves to go to the Emperor’s side soon after reconciling with their estranged and now adult child. Diurniel missed them, to some degree. He would not find their ghosts among the many that now circled above them. All of which, now that they were seen clearly, were blood thralls and the scattered few Astartes who were inconsolable upon their death. The gateway was indeed a simulacrum of the Blood Caller, stood at an awkward angle with nose aimed in a direction no barge should ever be able to point, its aft section rooted in the ground. 

Diurniel snarled and grasped his maul tightly. He could see shapes, tall and skeletal, marching up and down the corridors, firing off gauss beams that flayed away flesh and armor alike. Necrons. Foul, undead things that kept their age rotten souls bound inside of metallic bodies. He had hated them even as a living being rooted in Reality, but now that he was dead Diurniel found them truly irredeemable. Even Elysmaldus, the very epitome of patience and nobility, lowed his head like a charging bull, loosening the silver flail from its loop of leather. 

Without a word they stepped out of the in between. 

———

Constance did not slumber. Sleep was a concept she no longer needed, but her soul was worn and tired. A thing she did not even know could be possible up until now. She still felt every one of her death wounds but it was not with pain or anguish, but with a deep, darkening weakness that seemed fit to scatter her soul to the winds. It was an effort to hold herself together and so the best solution was to simply lay still and rest. While her eyes were closed and she saw nothing, the woman became acutely aware someone was now standing above her. It was not Diurniel or Elysmaldus. Both Astartes had left. This was another. A Blood Angels Librarian. She knew this because that’s what his soul radiated. There was no sense of danger, just mild annoyance. Constance did not like being stared at. 

Feeling something close to panic gripping her soul as she turned and opened her eyes, she thought the figure was Rhacelus at first. He wore the same sort of power armor, deep sapphire festooned with runes and honor marks that crawled up and over his psychic hood. But it couldn’t be, unless the old man had somehow managed to die in the same battle she did. 

Still resting under the veil but trying to move regardless, Constance was soon proven wrong. 

“Be still.” Came the voice. “I am epistolary Vode.”

It was rich and baritone, lacking the usual age and conviction Rhacelus’s had. He was also much, much younger yet he looked as if he were directly related to the old Librarian anyways. 

He smiled. “I am from the same tribe as Lord Rhacelus. Perhaps he might have been my birth father, in some other bygone time.”

Constance, confused, struggled under the veil but Vode shushed her. “Be still, I said. I was Lord Mephiston’s protege before Antros over three centuries ago. Your connections with my former master called me here. As did Lord Diurniel’s.” 

For a moment she thought to speak, but gave up, going limp. He smiled again. Throne, he did look so much like Rhacelus it was almost heartbreaking. 

But as the man drew closer the resemblances melted away. His armor was shocked from ceramite into true sapphire, so very deep blue and translucent enough to see blackened bone under the armor. A simple point was broken into, a hole in his chest where Vode’s two hearts had once been. In their place was a softly burbling welt of blood. His smile fell as he saw what she was looking at, touching the space with one delicate hand. 

“That is a tale for another day, child. I will not touch you and overwhelm you with details you need not know just yet. All I can saw now is you have more connections than you realize. You have a purpose here, or else Elysmaldus would have never made the offer. Remember that. I will be watching.”

Then he came apart. Literally. Like a statue that lost all constitution and crumbled to pieces before her very eyes. Eyes that were softly weeping blood, her mouth opening to cry out Rhacelus’s name. It carried out not as noise, but as a blast of emotion that was almost audible but not quite. 

Her soul hurt in ways she had never experienced before and realized, too late, that perhaps she had been in love with the old Librarian after all.


	2. The Warden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vigilance deals with aspects of her past she has since overlooked, only to have them used against her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, guys! Sorry for a very late chapter update. 2020 has effectively made me take splash damage and as such this won't be totally packed with new stuff. I'll be posting wips and artwork to the next chapter of To Serve instead. 
> 
> However, I have some credits to give!
> 
> Characters featured are Elysmaldus which belongs with my friend Kin, Buphegul belongs to my friend Brion and Alyxander belongs to my friend Cawl. HUGE thanks to all of them for letting me use their characters!! 
> 
> Diurniel is my character, as is Vigilance of course but the rest mentioned are canon characters!
> 
> NOTE: I would recommend a Latin translator for some parts. ;)
> 
> If anyone can guess where the horse and rider in this chapter is from, I will feature a character they want to see in the fic. ;)

Barely half aware, Constance watched as a rent opened in the pale sky, as cold and jagged as a chunk of ice in the void. At first she thought it might be her saviors returning, but soon something else entirely dipped out of a tear. A heavy, blue-green shape, wholly organic and flowing. As it became fully visible, the thing gave out a sepulchral whinny. A horse. Or at least something vaguely equestrian. It did not get any closer, steering just below the rent, but she could see it slightly better now. Writhed in icy green mist and flame, it reminded her of Diurniel and the hollow, internally burning frame he now bore in Limbo. Constance had no emotional reaction to any of this. No fear, no sense of curiosity, only a primitive need to watch as the horse, and its rider as she soon discovered, danced through a bank of ashen clouds. Kicking up and out it then charging back through the rent. The wound in Reality lingered a moment longer before sealing itself up like a wound. 

Just another ghost, she reasoned. Like herself. Diving in and out of Reality through a gate. The one Diurniel and Elysmaldus left through was still there, although she could hear it creaking like an old tree in the wind. In the clutches of her skeletal hands, the asphodel blooms begun to wilt, their pink-white pedals settling on her chest as soft as snow. For some reason, that was what snapped her out of it. Made her remember how and why she was here.

“Rhacelus.” She whispered the name through the cloth of the heavy veil, now a funeral shroud. She could see everything it was so thin but it weighed as much as chain mail. The weight of her sins perhaps? She imagined she had plenty of those. 

Even so she fought to get free, skeletal feet kicking out numbly. Her arms…her true arms which were now nothing but augments bare of synth-skin, tore at the bloody fabric. The ripping of it was like the parting of flesh, and it hurt like it too, yet she refused to give voice to her pain. 

Constance went tumbling off the stone altar a moment later, landing heavily on hands and knees. The shroud seemed to melt, becoming a pool of sticky, half clotted blood gathered in a pool under her. It stuck to her funeral dress even as she rose and cried out, fighting to keep her jangling legs moving. She ignored the sudden drop at the end of the platform. Where Diurniel and Elysmaldus had been able to swiftly navigate their way down, Constance allowed herself to simply…fall. 

And fall she did. Badly. Her tiny body went down the slope at a desperate roll, hitting the ash drifts at the bottom as hard as a log crashing into a river. Already dead, her bones could not be broken and the agony of impact was nothing. Gasping with breaths she did not actually need, Constance clawed her way to her feet and sprinted for the gate. The ghosts that harried its portal did not seem to see her, or if they did they must not have cared for she hissed and dove straight into the opening…

———

And plunged not into the depths of Blood Caller, but amid a whirl of other phantoms, orbiting a single man. A center point of red, red ceramite as tall and still as a statue. 

Mephiston. 

He, along with the rest of his entourage save for Antros, were sitting in the troop compartment of a Thunderhawk, the inner depths of which she could not see for the sheer bulk of other ghosts surrounding her. There was no sense of movement at all, but still a tempestuous planet raced by from what she could see through the viewing slot Mephiston’s eyes were locked upon. For one scarring moment Constance felt the need to scream at him. To damn him. But the rest of the torrent of souls seemed quiescent. For now. As she struggled through the press, she finally fought within view. 

Rhacelus was seated beside Mephiston, joined by lieutenant Servatus and, surprisingly, lord Bellerion. The front of the sanguinary priest’s apothecarium white armor was caked in blood. Her blood. Guilt rose up again, worse than when she was in Limbo, and wondered how the scholiast and Patience were doing. Were they still alive? They had to be. She’d sacrificed herself to save them after all. Right?

Rhacelus slowly hove closer and closer, seen from above as the torrent of souls raced around Mephiston, quiet but unable to be still. It was a struggle to get as close as she was, and then she tried to call out to him. The one who replied was not Rhacelus, but Mephiston.

He immediately looked at her, his face strangely haggard in his state of shock. She was startled as much by him as he was of her. Constance found herself fighting back a sudden surge of rage and fear. Impossible now. 

“…Vigilance?” Was Mephiston’s only word. The raspy utterance immediately brought Rhacelus to attention and he looked worse off than his master. 

She was Vigilance again. They could see her. Could they hear her? Did they not realize she was dead up until now? So many question, so very little time. 

“I’m…I’m so sorry, Rhacelus.” Vigilance muttered, wanting to hold him so very badly. “I think I love you. I didn’t realize that until I was already dead.”

Mephiston was transfixed upon her, as stunned into silence as Rhacelus was. A single, blue tinged tear began to roll down the epistolary’s age darkened cheek, but then the Thunderhawk jolted and the ghosts all around her began to wail. They rushed up and around them, clawing at Mephiston’s armor as if they were trying to break it open. The sheer tide of hatred that washed off of them caused her physical pain and she screamed. Rhacelus barked, reaching out for her. She just felt the brush of his gauntlet against the sleeve of her dress, when…

…someone else caught her before Rhacelus could, pulled back into the infinite white. Vigilance screamed out Rhacelus’s name until her throat hurt, losing him in a sea of dust and ash. Vigilance beat at the hand that grabbed her, fully prepared to turn her teeth upon it until she saw just whom had snagged her in the first place.

The rider and the steed. The dead woman had never gotten a good look at them from what she could see, laying flat on the altar, but this was clearly them. The steed looked as if it were one of Nurgle’s cursed creations, literally all skin and bone leaking a noxiously cold mist, yet it lacked every other signifier. It did not reek, but smelt instead of permafrost and bone. Same for its rider. A faceless mask of ivory peering at her through two red, red eyes, his expression totally obscured although it was obvious there was no malice there, just disinterest boarding on boredom.

They were running along an unseen track of ground, or…something. All around them was white save for herself and the cadaverous man, as big as a space marine, who owned that cold, cold hand. 

“Who are you?” She rasped. 

“I am Death.”

He needed only to answer and she was released. The rider and steed fell away rapidly, hoofbeats carrying them even further as Vigilance broke through a barrier than felt like splitting fabric. The ash banks of the dried river rose up underneath her, but in death she had no fear of the landing. And even then physics had no baring here. A drift of wind caught her impossibly, filled with the sounds of Rhacelus’s grieving tones as it carried her. Back towards the altar stone. She willingly let herself be dumped onto its cool surface, thrown into the depths of something else. A memory. One Vigilance had not thought of for a very, very long time…

———

Constance Valdoria wasn’t afraid of much anymore. Years and years of working with Inquisitors would do that to you, although her lack of fear was deeper than mere experience. But this? This was making her nervous. Not…scared, just nervous. One year of formally writing a missive in the proper format, text and documentation. Then another ten waiting for a reply she wasn’t even sure she would received. It was a big risk just sending this out in the first place. If any of her previous employers ever discovered the contents she wouldn’t be alive anymore. But it had gotten through and she’d received a formal acceptance. That was a week ago. A week spent pointlessly worrying over manners of dress, presentation and language. All of it went right out the door the moment she actually left for the Palace. But she was here. Now. In the depths of the home of Him on Earth, upon the inner Walls that Dorn himself had walked. This was the domain of the Imperial Fists. 

Imperial Fists on Terra were as much to be feared as respected. Like the legendary Custodes she had long heard rumors of, the Fists did not leave the Walls and no citizen was allowed to see any of them unless it was of the most dire importance. That Constance’s missive managed to get to the Chapter at all was…not something she had counted on, honestly. But here she was.

Escorted by a silent chapter serf, Constance clutched at the soft-shell cases of her tablets and tried to breathe. Her augmented limbs prevented her from experiencing much in the ways of physical fatigue, but mentally speaking that was another story. She had not slept for the stress of it and the stim she took could only keep her awake. It did not prevent the panic nor the hot edged migraine that slowly climbed in tempo the longer they walked. 

Temperatures plummeted until she could feel the chill even under her thick petticoats and blouse. By her estimate they could be as much as a mile under the surface. As her breath frosted in front of her, Constance counted those miles in an attempt to calm herself. Ten vanished under her feet before they reached her destination. A full five hours of walking. 

They stopped in front of what the serf described as a confessional. Constance was familiar with them, but to her they were small booths rather than an entire archway fronted by massive onyx doors. The serf ignored her attempts at a question, hefting a door knocker as big as his head and let it fall with a din of noise that immediately shut her up. He bowed and then went scurrying from the hall so quickly the woman was unable to chastise him. Irritated, Constance fumbled at the folio at her back and peered through the gloom at the tight, golden script crawling across the parchment. Her interviewer introduced himself as Alyxander, but produced little else in the ways of detail save for directions, times and exactly what was required of her. 

Automated servitors embedded in the workings of the door frame itself rattled out a string of prayers, opening the door to a booth sized for demi-gods. There would be, perhaps, two feet of clearance from where a seated Astarte’s head would be between them and the ceiling. The seat was sat flush to the back wall and carved from a single, massive chunk of ironwood painted a deep black like the rest of the chamber. Constance had to hop just to reach it. In front of her was the screen, also of ironwood and delicately cut so the holes were Maltese crosses about as big as her fist but no more than that. A bit of light, the sources of which were hidden in the frame of the screen itself, offered little visibility but this was fine by her. 

Because the restorationist was starting to realize she was not to be speaking to a human at all. Too late. By the time her hands were trying to wrench the door open, a shape stepped behind the screen, his footsteps so heavy the wooden screen and seat vibrated. Alyxander was not just an Imperial Fist, but a chaplain clad in terminator armor almost as old as the Walls themselves. The ivory skulled helm of which stood out so viciously from the sable surrounding it Constance saw it as faintly luminous wraith floating in the darkness. Her feet were about to start pounding on the door when Alyxander finally spoke. It was so deep and barren of emotion the vox emitter in his gorget had some difficulty picking it up.

“Dicere veritatem, supplicant.” 

“Ego Constance Valdoria, E...Ego servire Imperator et Ipse solus. Ego loqui nisi veritatem. Iuro!” She yammered out in High Gothic, her words slurred with the dryness of her mouth. 

“Tace! Tibi dixit ad me, et ego sum hic. Si terrore hoc colloquium est super.”

Constance fought down another swell of fear. High Gothic wasn’t hard to speak for a native of Terra, but it required an amount of concentration fear would not allow her if she wasn’t careful. 

“E-Ego sum in pace.”

The skull helm glowered at her for a time before Alyxander grunted and reached up with one massive gauntlet. There was a hiss of depressurizing air as it was lifted free and revealed the man beneath. His face was almost as terrible as the helm had been. Pale from spending years at a time in armor with bone white hair groomed into a short sweep at the front, crawling down into thick but neatly trimmed sideburns. His eyes were cold and steely, the skin around them permanently hardened into puckers of scar tissue that gave him a perpetual scowl. His mouth was little better. One particularly bad claw mark had lifted his lips up and away from one canine tooth, emphasizing a lopsided expression of endless but quiet disappointment. It wasn’t pleasant to look at and frankly Constance would have rather been staring at the skull. He made no move to put it back on, but he did unlock the screen. It swung towards him, admitting the woman into a darkened but somber space beyond. 

“Venit.” He ordered. Without the scratch of the vox, his voice was softer but no less deep. As if he were speaking from the bottom of a well. Constance mindfully hopped down from the oversized seat and followed him at pace, her augments at least enabling her to follow his titanic strides. 

It took only a single studied glance for her to conclude this was the depths of a hidden reliquary. Statuary not of Imperial Saints but of Dorn and the Emperor Himself lined the walls, and none of them were likely part of the original decoration. In fact many antechambers and alcoves looked like they had either been hastily filled in or carved from what was originally there, the stucco either not matching in most places or was stripped completely, revealing what looked to be bare iron underneath. To an untrained eye the place was still magnificent and ancient beyond telling, but to a restorationist and certainly to the chaplain himself, the conditions were barely acceptable. Despite the grander of the relics there was still much missing and what was here was damaged or neglected. 

Constance peeled her eyes away from the chamber and focused instead on its most important resident. Alyxander thankfully did not lead her far, inviting her to sit at a table made for humans, leaving her to wonder if he had ordered it put there just for her. Nonetheless she took a seat and calmed marginally. Hilariously tiny compared to her interviewer, Constance still remembered the most essential item she had brought along. It was slender and small enough to be mistaken for pen. Which was the point. She sat it on the table in front of her, gently tapping the device. 

“Potest ego track hoc sermone?” 

He stared down at the device. For a moment Constance was afraid he might smash it. Recording the interview was not part of the deal, but Alyxander honestly looked unbothered. 

Instead of answering her directly, he said. “Ego sinet quidam misericordiam hodie, tibi sunt hominum. Autem, tempus est limitatum. Dicere quod oportet. Si non respice me in oculo, non tendunt ad petitiotua.”

“Amen dico vobis, dominus meus.”

“Good.” Alyxander grunted, switching to Low Gothic. “Be swift.”

And she was. Once the device was clicked on and checked, she hefted the heavy folio from her back and thumbed through a number of documents. Constance had gone through these same motions so many times with so many different clients she barely thought of formality and blatantly presented him with papers he could not even lift let alone functionally read. 

“I have the locations of what I believe are five Imperial Fist relics currently belonging to an Inquisitor. He was my last client and as far as I’m aware he’s still on Terra.”

She regretted her forwardness almost immediately, watching in badly veiled horror as Alyxander’s face visibly darkened. With painful slowness, he leaned forward until she could smell the musk of his breath. At such a close distance she could see the pores of his skin and the ivory of his beard where it scrapped the inside of his gorget. 

“Elaborate. Immediately.”

“I…I worked on them about two decades ago but I didn’t really realize what they were until later. He claimed they’re duplicates. Not counterfeits exactly, but considering the amount of waivers I had to sign this made me…suspicious.” She shook as she activated one of her tablets. An expensive, rubber and silicon gel screen older than her that obediently flickered to life, displaying several full sized, colorized picts. Constance activated the hololith feature as much for her own benefit as his. “I ended up having to do a lot of research to restore them and found my, uh, suspicious were likely very correct. I acted like I didn’t know, however and did the usual restoration work. Albeit I logged everything as carefully as possible and didn’t tell anyone. I…sent in my petition about a year afterwords.”

He was staring at the display flickering about three inches above the gel screen surface, expression totally flat as his eyes moved from one pict to the next. The most prominent of which was a signet ring of complex design. So complex in fact it was impossible to have been made by human hands. It was also huge. An Imperial token was put beside it in one pict, showing that it vastly outsized any human finger. 

“If…if I researched this correctly, this is a ring meant for a Black Templar.” She struggled to say the words. Templars were known even to Terrans. Mothers would tell stories of them to scare their children into obedience. The billions of lowly menials that worked in the bowels of Administratum buildings whispered about seeing black shadows lurking in the night, welding broad swords as big as men to slay those who had faltered in their prayers. Constance found the notion ridiculous, but she was still privy to them when the mood felt right. Such as right now.

“It was meant for the original Black Templar.” Alyxander snarled in reply, a sound so disquieting it made Constance want to vomit in terror. “The only time Sigismund ever removed this ring was after Dorn…mm, you would not know of it. I have seen enough. Turn off the tablet and do not speak of this to anyone.”

The woman did so quickly. “M-My lord?”

“Tace! Be silent. All of these relics are real. I know this because there is absolutely no reason any human alive today should know of them. In fact I’m sure the imbecile who claims to own them now has no idea of their significance. And if he does…” He looked at her. One flinty eye caught the blood orange flame of a passing grav-candle, igniting steel like a lit coal. He did not even need to have his helm on to appear as the Emperor’s deathly visage. “Either way, he is to die. I have made my sentence.” 

He left shortly after with a haste that Constance knew meant war. All this time she had given little thought to what might happen to her former client once she told the Fists he had their relics. Mostly she felt relief. After all this time being tortured by political rivals and gaining wealth through hush payments alone, the woman thought, maybe, her dignity would return too. Instead, it was…mostly just relief. And cynicism. Constance’s purview of her fellow human beings had truly rotted under all the pain and stress. 

Was she broken? 

Probably. Nothing money could not fix eventually. At least, that’s what she kept telling herself. She rose from the table, a while after Alyxander left, and went for the confessional. 

This is when she realized this was not a memory. The same chapter serf should have been waiting for her, annoyed that Constance did not adhere to the strict time schedules his master had set. Instead, she encountered another figured entirely. 

One she almost missed. 

Another Astartes stood just outside the doorway, as big as Alyxander and wearing practically the same armor. What hit her first was not the creature’s sudden appearance, but his smell. Where Alyxander, and really any and all Astartes, smelt of ozone denoting active power armor, what stood in front of her had a purely organic scent. Salty and unfamiliar. Not quite sickly, although her senses briefly made her gag at the proximity. 

Holding her nose to ward off the smell, she stood gaping at him as Constance attempted to make sense of the intrusion. He was not an Imperial Fist, that much was obvious. The color of green jasper edged in tarnished brass, he born no chapter markings she knew, suddenly becoming aware this new entity could be harmful. 

Constance’s mind only just processed the need to run before he reached a hand out, as quick as a serpent, and caught her by the collar. The woman screamed, but soon stuffed the noise back down her throat, realizing how useless that would be. In actuality, her resolved lasted all of five seconds. What broke her was the feeling of something wet and soft coiling around her arm. She felt it as a pressure against her shoulder, and then as a smell. Constance had never once been to the sea, as those no longer existed on Terra, but she knew what the food pulled up from the depths looked and tasted like. This was a tentacle. 

She screamed. Louder this time, detaching her arm at the shoulder. It came free with a sound of tearing synth skin and cloth as she bolted backwards, ripping the sleeve and front of her blouse off in his massive gauntlet. 

He did not pursuit, slowly turning his blunt helmed head in her direction as Constance fled down the corridor with augmented speed. 

———

Constance, no longer Vigilance in the way she had been in life, become aware again. Another was standing above her. Not the behemoth that had grabbed her, but someone she knew this time. Even so the woman still flinched, her semi-skeletal body burning with the need to escape. 

“Vode.” She breathed, too weak and tired to move despite the scare.

Vode was as much the same way he had been when they first met. Boringly plain and almost handsome in his regularity. Again with his strong, grief-stirring resemblance to Rhacelus. At least as far as his face went. The rest of him looked oddly tarnished as if fresh from battle, the ceramite chipped away like it was merely stone and not one of the strongest, heat resistant materials to date. Stranger still was the pair of red, tremulous wings at his back. They hadn’t been there before, right?

“Why do you keep coming here.” She asked, irritated that he didn’t speak first. “And who was that in my memories?”

“I’ve already told you.” He replied, apparently amused and completely ignoring the second part of her question. He moved around in rhythmic motions as Constance realized he had an axe in hand. Long handled with its wide blade slammed into the stone, scoring the surface, sketching out a crude design. She’d seen similar etchings woven into the hundreds of rugs that littered Mephiston’s personal chambers, suddenly recalling a bit of her life before. 

Constance panicked at first. Witchcraft was not her forte although the chief librarian had certainly surrounded her in it for the week or so she’d worked on that damned map. It still caused a twitch of fear. That…fight or flight response all baseline humans possessed regardless of age, race or gender. 

Before she could protest verbally he stopped, putting a gauntleted finger to his mouth. “Hush. You are very weak. Being torn from Reality like that nearly stripped you. I’m merely inscribing a stave into the stone. It will keep you safe. Or, at least, it will keep you from wondering off again.”

She felt it then. That terrible, soul crushing tiredness that was there before, but so much worse now. That her body still wanted to twitch and fight and jerk made it nearly unbearable. It was so different than the physical exhaustion she was used to in life. 

“Did I…do something wrong? Does Elys…maldus know you’re here? Who was that…that thing?”

“So many questions.” He whispered, true pity in his voice as he finished the stave and yanked his axe free. It vanished from his grip, crumbling like loose soil. “But no. No one knows I’m here. The gate had to be closed behind you, but Lords Elysmaldus and Diurniel can find their way back regardless.” 

“I don’t understand! You didn’t answer me! Who was he!? And who was the rider?” 

He shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand. Not for a while yet. But I would stop trying to ask questions if I were you. You know where that got you last time, girl. And no more escape attempts. You likely won’t survive Reality a second time.”

Motionless upon the altar, Constance cringed. “I’m sorry. I just…I have no idea what’s going on. I miss Rhacelus. I just wanted to see him again. One last time.”

“Love is a powerful connection, isn’t it? A bond that translates across life and death.” 

She took in a slow, unneeded breath. “Are…is the scholiast still alive? Is Patience? If you’re not going to answer anything else, tell me that at least.”

He blinked slowly, then sighed. “ Very well. Yes, they live. Although their minds were nearly struck clean. Their memories will be scattered and what truly happened between you and the scholiast will be obscured for a time yet.”

Constance fought the urge to move again, willing her aching limbs to stay still. All six of them. “What the hell’s going to happen to them? Did Mephiston really intend to kill me like Antros claimed?”

“Antros lied.” Answered Vode, a storm writhing the inside of his skull.“For reasons both insidious and sincere. This will be obvious, once you parse the memory.”

That alone shocked her more than seeing Rhacelus again. “So I…I panicked myself right into a death wish for nothing?”

Vode was quiet then. His expression, too, was pained. He groaned as his wings shook, feathers becoming leather, stretching into terrible, bloody shapes. One of them seemed to be a fang faced replica of Sanguinius, roaring with such unnatural fury that it could not be the Great Angel at all, but a terrible, heretical imposter. Then both wings tore away of their own accord, blood, bones and skin molding into an entirely different shape perched upon his shoulder.

As it shed its fleshy cocoon, it was revealed to be some sort of raptor, all golden and viciously beautiful. Except for its eyes. Oh, throne its eyes were as black and round as onyx beads and just as emotionless. Confused and horrified, Constance watched as the eagle peered down at her before Vode spoke up.

“Some of the living wear their sins openly.” Muttered the dead librarian, reaching up to gingerly chain the beast that had been birthed from his wings. “Just as Arkio did. He was the one who slew me in life and in his death he now serves me as a slave beast.”

“So…throne, are you saying there’s some sort of cosmic justice? That everything will be alright in the end?” Constance sneered weakly. Sarcastically. She was starting to mistrust Vode in way she couldn’t quite fathom. Not yet. 

“If only it were that simple. But I must go. Arkio will watch you. If you need me, just call to him.”

She almost surely did not ever want to do that. As Vode crumbled into sapphire dust, just as he had before, the golden, black eyed bird took wing and wheeled away from the altar in stately flight. She watched it go. “Arkio. What the hell else is lord Mephiston hiding?”

“Mephiston is not the one who is hiding, child.” Rumbled a voice that sounded as if it were spoken at a distance from the inside of an empty water tank.  
First a set of pauldrons and then an armored helm rose from the ash banks at the foot of the altar. It was the same tentacled Astartes, seemingly birthed into being from the depths of her invaded memory. Constance did not even try to yell this time, watching in exhausted exasperation as he simply walked up the cliff face towards her. No longer obscured by the shadows of the corridor, Constance could see that he was not just wet, but soaking. Constantly dripping foul water from the nooks and crannies and his terminator armor, collecting in brackish pools at his feet as he moved to stand where she could clearly see him. 

He had possession of both hands and arms, the tendrils emerging from within the armor rather than actually replacing a limb like she originally thought. One one such hand clutched an odd weapon. It was a full eleven feet in length with most of it being taken up by a cruelly crooked hook that looked to be hybrid of a gaff and a harpoon exaggerated to massive proportions. Instead of a war apron or skirt, he wore a belt of chains that dangled more of the same in long trains behind him, most if not all tipped in hooks or other twists of metal. It all smelt rusty and sick with salt rot. Constance would have vomited, had she still possessed a stomach. 

“F-Fuck you…” Was all she could gag up. 

“Oh, don’t be droll.” He rumbled, clicking the weapon against the stone. At his feet the stave seemed to spark, resisting his footfalls as he came to step closer. Something snapped in the air with a firecracker bright pop and he was through, putting his massive bulk directly in her face. “Vode was the one avoiding your questions.”

Furious, Constance made an effort to sit up, clutching at a length of rusty to chain to gain leverage but her torso was a dead weight. “Then you had best be here to give me answers! Who are you?”

Very carefully, there terminator pulled her hands away, pinning them to the altar. He replied by leaning forwards, dribbling salt water across her hair and face. “I am called Buphegohl. This dried sea bed of ash and ghosts was once called the river Styx, but that was nearly a hundred thousand years ago. It has no name now and its function as a barrier between life and death is no longer relevant. Your God Emperor drained its waters and it became a realm of Earth’s banished gods and goddesses. Perhaps, once, I would have been named Charon as Elysmaldus might have once been called Thanatos. I don’t expect you to understand the significance of those names.”

He sighed and moved away, but stayed in eyeshot. “This place is neither Reality nor the Warp. Neither good nor evil. At best its a memory of humanity’s ancient and forgotten past, anchored into existence out of sentimentality rather than necessity. Even so, its come to serve a purpose.”

“…as a prison?” 

“Yesssss.” He hissed in pleasure. “A prison. Where your God Emperor put all of the things he could not kill. Where things not even the Warp would dare take are contained, in the hopes they never escape.” A soft, burbling chuckle rose from his vox grill. “And I am its Warden.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After this chapter, I'll be taking a bit of break at least until 2021 is able to roll around officially and all of the nonsense is...hopefully settled. Somewhat. I'll spare everyone much in the ways of details but I will still be writing, just in the background. <3
> 
> Please leave a comment if you want, wear a mask and stay safe next year!!


	3. Dark Waters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Constance's memories are all but used against her, but her last call was heard...and answered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was certainly a very long chapter, packed with exposition, action and gore. Warnings apply for all of it. I also decided to hold off on posting anymore art considering I'm electing to add an art page eventually. 
> 
> Lots of new characters were also introduced or fleshed out today so I will be crediting the friends they belong to below. Thank you bunches to all of them for helping me with this chapter!

Locked within the darkened confines of an adamantium coffin, Alyxander kept his eyes closed and his irritation ripe. It had taken him two hours to commender a chapter ship of adequate size to launch a drop pod and another hour to get him and his warplate fitted into it. The deep strike vehicle was not designed to hold terminators of his armor type and so special modifications had to be made. That took longer. At the three hour mark, the chaplain had lost patience and demanded he be simply welded into a crash cage instead. Techmarine Sigisian had balked at the idea, but knew better than to insist otherwise. Even at speed that still took another ten minutes. In that time Alyxander’s patience was at its end. Willpower was the only thing keeping his limbs still and his anger in check.

Alyxander did not bother to set a clock or count down the minutes in an attempt to stay calm. He was also alone. Only a single Imperial Fists squadron would be on the ground and they would not be with him. Sigisian, stationed on the ship as the mission’s sole reconnaissance, would be providing intel when the chaplain needed it.

Even so, what he was about to do was sheer overkill. 

The pod kicked. His mind went quiet and his temper became ice in his veins. The rudimentary machine spirit of the drop pod garbled out in base Gothic then blipped.

A second later the floor fell out from under his boots and gravity became a mere suggestion. His Cataphractii pattern armor, joints warming, prepared for the massive shock of a ballistic landing. Three seconds. Five. Ten.

He hit, crashing through one layer and then another. Finally, a third arrested his fall. The impact was titanic, feeling it even through the advanced shock absorption of his terminator armor. The crash cage shattered but it had done its work.

Gritting his teeth against a swiftly settling soreness, Alyxander opened his eyes and the skull helm’s ruby lenses ignited with twin flares of light. First he saw only the inside of the pod before it bloomed open. Helm autosensors illuminated the inside of what had once been an ornate dining room of sorts. Now destroyed, a near perfect circle of destruction had blown out rosette windows and blasted banners from the vaulted walls. Good. He had landed on course, within the chamber where the Lord Inquisitor Damanov would have welcomed most of his guests. Constance’s description matched what he saw was left. As for the location of the lord of the house himself, and the location of the relics he knew would be here, Alyxander intended to find out. 

Soon, an alarm began to twitter from vox speakers hidden in the artistry of the walls.

He waited only a second more, already detecting several biosigns that somehow still lived despite the ruination, picked out in sharp forest green against the dull grey of sensor feedback. No lumes were on. The hole his pod had made through the frescoed ceiling cut almost all power to this portion of the sanctum. He did not need light to see as he stepped unhurriedly into the dusty gloom. Steel scaffolding from the crash cage shed from his armor as he reached for his weapons. The Last Wall in his left gauntlet and his storm bolter wielded one handed, in his right. The latter flared to life lightning bright, mowing down a biosign that tried to stagger in from the antechamber beyond. It went down before he could even have a good look at it. Nor did he care to.

Two more coming in from the adjacent hallways were put down under another rain of mass reactive shells. Both were wailing guards in high grade carapace armor grasping plasma pistols. Neither of them had the wits to have even fired yet. The weakness of it disgusted him, snarling as he sallied forth to continue wading through a low tide of shattered flagstones and the remains of what had once been a ten foot dining table.

What few biosigns still lingered in the room by then were largely immobile. He swung his massive form about and lowered his weapon. The nearest was a servant of some sort. He could not tell if they were injured from where he stood, but as he approached them it became apparent why they were sluggish. A jagged shard of glass was lodged near their throat, a cascade of blood showing as a thermal bloom flowing down their right flank. They would not live long. Acting quickly, Alyxander’s vox hailer activated with a discordant growl.

“Where is Lord Inquisitor Damanov?”

The servant coughed. It was a sound that hinted at their lungs slowly filling with fluid, but they had enough air to speak. 

“In…In the…archives, d-down below. L-Last...level.”

Alyxander did not reply. He merely leaned forward and shoved his boot into the cowering form. It killed the human quickly. The only mercy he currently possessed.

“Lord Chaplain.” Came a scratchy transmission from the closed channel a half second later. Assault squad Sevrecht. The only other Fists committed to this mission aside from the techmarine. “The compound has already begun evacuation.”

“Cut them down. All of them.”

To the sergeant’s credit he hesitated for only a moment. A moment, thought Alyxander, he would be punished for regardless.

“Affirmative.”

Another transmission crackled on the same channel. Techmarine Sigisian. “All vox traffic in and around the compound is being monitored and jammed as well.”

“If any match the vocal print of the Lord Inquisitor, notify me immediately.”

The link cut.

That was when Alyxander broke into a run. It was difficult to do in Cataphractii pattern armor, but the chaplain had worn this particular suit for so long his memory of the times before seemed hazy by comparison. It was no longer a weight he had to focus on to coordinate, but a part of him that obeyed his will and enhanced his muscles beyond what a regular mark of power armor could. He barely bothered to correct his path when he felt a hail of stubber and las rounds punch against his armor. Little more troubling than heavy rain as they fizzled and popped against the armor’s active power field.

Auto defence systems, his readout told him. He blink clicked it away, not caring. He cared even less about the guards and other servants he ran over or gunned down. Most were smart enough to leave immediately. Others, although they died braver than their fellows, were eliminated painfully. Eventually he reached the end of a long gallery and had to stop at a T-junction.

Annoyed, he snorted and ramped his hailer up to full volume, roaring a declaration down both connecting corridors with such fury it vibrated a painting off one wall.

“Get out of my way! Your master is to be put to death. Any stupid enough to defend him will meet the same fate. Run!”

He did not accent his words with a snap of bolter fire, or any other grand gesture. The auto defense systems still attempted to kill him, but the wholly organic assailants stopped. Even the servitors, abominable things though they were, seemed to reconsider their programming. For a moment. They were punished for that hesitation as well.

Alyxander left the gallery, moving at a jog towards the turbolift to his immediate right unimpeded. The lift itself, however, was a bit of a problem. He would easily overload the carriage. Even if it could stand his weight, it was not designed for anyone his size regardless. A simple enough fix. Reaching in, Alyxander ripped away both doors, peeling them aside as if they were the skin of a fruit. The shaft beyond was dark and empty, the carriage having stopped a floor below, leaving the taught cables exposed. With an effort impossible outside of Cataphractii armor, the chaplain ripped through the cables barehanded and let his burden drop. He waited only long enough for the inevitable cacophony before forcing himself through the blackened egress. He fell.

Cushioned by the nest of crumbled debris at the bottom, his armor was able to compensate a little easier than it did in the drop pod. No shooting pain invaded his joints, nor the sharp pinch of pistons bending against the strain. Alyxander hefted the Last Wall and bullied his way out of the elevator shaft, tearing away the frame. 

This time the auto defence systems caused an alarm to ring across his readout. Bolters. They smacked into his armor a second later, but not before he could swing the Last Wall up and out, hunkering behind it like a charging auroch of ancient Terra. This shield was his own personal weapon. A hunk of adamantium as tall and thick as he further bolstered by a power generator force wielded to its inner curve. It held. Its power field showed as a crackling cyan gleam, smoking and popping mightily as it turned away mass reactive shells that would have shredded apart any normal lone Astartes. 

But he was an Imperial Fist. A son of Rogal Dorn. He simply walked through the explosive barrage despite several pings warning of inevitable breaches and fluid leaks. Eventually, he felt it. A small, but infinitely annoying twinge as a bolt round finally got through, puncturing a seal at the back of his right knee. He let it stoke his anger as the wound burned then clotted shut. 

“Hng. That’s all you get.” 

Overcharging the power field of the Last Wall, Alyxander truly tested the limits of his suit in a single, furious charge. Before him was a sealed blast door, likely almost as thick as himself that parted in the middle. He crashed into it with the force of a Rhino. It held. Unrelenting, he fired into the door at point blank range, ignoring the deafening screech of metal and the hot flash of overheated adamantium as his helm struggled to compensate. Soon the rim of the shield began to glow, a red hot halo of hatred as Alyxander let his storm bolter fall from his grip, clanking empty. 

He punched. Over and over again until the unyielding metal finally gave way. It did not break so much as sag. Clicking off the overworked power field at last, he relaxed his shield arm and kicked his way through. Molten metal and charred plaster dirtied his pauldrons as he emerged into the foyer of a vast, ligneous chamber. It took the ancient autosensors of his battle plate only a nanosecond to adjust before data screeds began rolling across his eyes. 

This was less an archive as the dead servant described, and more the dishevelled and cramped domain of an insane librarian. It was dark, all lumes purposefully kept off to avoid light exposure. Piles upon piles of tomes were stacked from floor to ceiling, forming labyrinthine corridors in an already confused and badly organized area. To think that this damned Lord Inquisitor would keep such terrible care of his knowledge put to mind what he must be like now. The thought of it made his already perpetual sneer deepen, shouldering through walls upon walls of books, leaflets and other all but discarded stacks of paper, vellum and papyrus. It was like walking through snow drifts as tall as a Thunderhawk. There were shelves, but they had long since collapsed under the sheer weight of their burden and offered no support. Unarmed servants moaned in terror at his arrival, scattering from his path like sump rats, bearing torches or lamps as they darted under unseen egresses or hid blindly under desks smothered with paper. Some clattered up ladders that led up into lofts or wooden cloisters, but none dared bar him. 

“Sigisian. Slave my vox link to the fortress’s internal comms.” 

A moment later there was a click of confirmation. Alyxander was careful with his words, but fury was swiftly pushing him towards tactics he would never use unless he was purposefully terrifying the enemy. Which was exactly what he was doing now. He addressed the Lord Inquisitor. Directly.

“Damanov! You have something that belongs to the Imperial Fists. Either you are a fool or a thieving bastard. I care not. I am here to retrieve the relics and kill you. Your cooperation in the matter decides in which order this is executed.” 

At first there was no reply save for the continued clamoring of the Inquisitor’s minions. Soon enough, the overhead lumes began to flicker on. 

They were not lumes. Alyxander burst into a loping run as intense, lambent heat signatures from above kept climbing, hinting all too clearly at thermal weapons. He got out of there just in time. There was a hiss of discharging plasma before everything at his back became a clawing inferno. With so much ignitable content, the backdraft was nearly strong enough to tug him off his feet. Paint bubbled and popped off his pauldrons. The war apron at his waist was dragged then torn off entirely, sucked into the conflagration. The inferno chased him down until he was forced to spin on one heel and stride backwards, the Last Wall held aloft. Its powerfield was nearly burned out, but he did not need it to block heat. Worse, the roared screams of servants set alight nearly drowned out the howling flames. More than anything Alyxander began to hate Damanov just for that. The chaplain had specifically decided to spare those humans because they were smart enough not to impede him. Now he was forced to smash several aside as they staggered into his path, their robes blazing and their throats choked with smoke as they tried to scream. 

Whispering prayers to his battle plate, Alyxander steered his fire and blood wreathed bulk out of the archives. He stopped only when his boots rang against bare metal rather than a carpet of smoldering paper and skin. By then the place he had just exited resembled Old Earth depictions of Hell. He had no wish to witness it further, turning away. 

“Damonov.” Alyxander declared, vox still active. “I was only going to have you and your household executed. I will make your life pure agony instead. I will exhume you from this damned place and nail you, palm and foot, to the fore of my Landraider. You will be alive and wide awake for this. And you will endure not just this pain, but the indignity of being fed through a tube up your ass. For however long I wish.”

A reply came after several long seconds. It was clogged with what sounded like fear, but Alyxander quickly identified it as warbling aggrievement. 

“How dare you! Those relics were in my family for generations! You can’t do this to me!”

Ignoring the rant, Alyxander rapidly switched to a private channel. “Sigisian. Pinpoint the location of that transmission.” 

“...mm, it is shielded. I’m also reading a massive heat signature near you?”

“Indeed. He set fire to his own archives trying to kill me. I am unaffected. Find me his location.”

Another ten seconds. Seconds that Alyxander was forced to waste. 

“My lord. It is still shielded but I’ve concluded the Lord Inquisitor’s voice print is being scrambled by a massive power source. I suspect he might be hiding near a generator. One large enough to affect the vox. There is one on this level. I will send you the coordinates.”

“No need.” 

While he disliked having an honored but far less active station on Terra, Alyxander was given the luxury of knowledge and the time in which to gain it. All Imperial Fists knew the layout of the Imperial Palace, but few who never got to serve on Terra itself would have access to the planet’s complex, but highly consistent infrastructure. The chaplain needed only to scan his eidetic memory to find what he needed. Ancient charts marked this structure, as with most others in the district, to be a pre-Imperial manufactorum that had gone through only a handful of revisions in its long life. He knew exactly where the genetorium would be. Within a span of three seconds Alyxander had pinned a new objective, blink-clicked it into the suit’s auspex, and prepared to wade back into the inferno.

He stopped. Up until now the biosigns he had detected lurking at the very back of the scriptorum had been motionless, either choking from the lack of oxygen or stilled out of fear. Now they stirred, leviathan slow. 

There were only five of them. All unaugmented humans sweating and gasping in the heat. Alyxander wanted to ignore them, but one spoke. Or tried.

“My...lord…pl-please...” 

He turned. The man was red faced and wide eyed, struggling to breathe through a mouth that hung open. Salivating excessively as his body attempted to cool itself. He had no sympathy for this man, nor any of the others moaning behind him. But to refuse them a swift death or salvation would be a stain against his pride as a Fist. 

Pulling his mind away from tactical assets, he found a trail of insulated wires and an ancient pull switch encased in glass they led into. The design had changed very little in the millenia before the Emperor’s ascension. All knew exactly what an extinguisher system looked like. Yet it took an almost comical amount of concentration for him to poke a single finger through the glass and throw the switch without breaking it. And even so the lever still bent under the strain. 

His helm’s audio filtration immediately muted the clatter of the alarm, paying only a miniscule amount of attention to his autosensors as they counted down a sheer temperature drop. Steam hissed off his armor as overhead sprinklers jetted out fire retardant foam into the chamber and beyond. Behind him the humans gasped, treating the foul shower as if it were fresh rain. Alyxander left, stumping through a quickly growing slurry of soot streaked foam and pulped paper. It formed such a sluggish tide that the chaplain had to walk stiff kneed until his sabatons had an iron floor to maglock to. By then he was already redirecting not through the main thoroughfare, leading off into servants quarters and common rooms, but down into a relatively cramped maintenance corridor that slanted towards what would have been a ground floor. Were the complex not subsumed by the substrata of continuous expansion over the millenia. 

The further down he went, his own suspicions became increasingly confirmed. As expected, techmarine Sigisian tried to ring in over the vox, but the signal was so scrambled it came in bursts of static that itched his gums. Instead of offering a verbal reply, he keyed in the vox once, twice in reassurance then switched it off entirely. It was right around that time that his armor began to seriously pulse in alarm. Dangerous levels of ambient radiation. Stronger than what the naked void was capable of in bare orbit above Terra, directly facing Sol. 

He knew exactly where the Inquisitor would be then.

Eventually the incline leveled out into a bare rockrete warehouse nearly a mile across in all directions. Once this used to be the main floor of the manufactorum but ancient reports that were all but footnotes in the Terran archives mentioned a single, heavily redacted incident. The only thing that qued him in on what truly happened were the reported evacuations and a military cordon that put this area on lockdown for almost a decade. 

This was once a manufactorum, but before that it had been a decommissioned nuclear power plant. One that had catastrophically melted down and was covered up for decades, its contamination improperly disposed of and buried under miles of rockcrete industry. Until it wasn’t.

It made for a decent hiding place, Alyxander was forced to admit. But that was the only thing he would give Damanov.

Silencing the harrying alarms, the chaplain continued forward aware that any significant breach could possibly put him at risk. Any of his brothers in regular power armor would have had to move quickly themselves. Alyxander did none of those things.

A single bunker was visible at the far end of the space, silent and sealed behind a blast door that was undoubtedly lead lined. He hefted the Last Wall and risked a glance down at the shield generator. The device buzzed warily, but appeared to be in working order. A quick flick of the activation rune confirmed that. 

Just as the first blast door went down, so too did this one. It took long, agonizing efforts of sheer brute force, at which point the generator finally went out in a shower of sparks. He was aware of hot metal searing across his helm as bright argent scars but kept going. It finally gave way, so suddenly Alyxander nearly pitched forward. 

He found Lord Inquisitor Damanov, utterly swamped in an environmental suit so heavily and specially modified the man moved as if he himself were made out of lead. Casually dropping his now dead shield, the chaplain hunched over and reached in with no particular hurry. Between the cramped bunker and the terminator utterly consuming the exit, he had nowhere to go. 

Damanov began to curse, or perhaps scream, but the bulbous plasteel faceplate muffled any real words. Verily, Alyxander’s taciturn choler was such that he considered tearing open the man’s suit. Not by much, just enough for the radiation to leak in. He thought better of it. Alyxander had expected nothing and was still disappointed. Reminding himself that all that would show of this mission were the recovered relics and a heavily irradiated suit that would need to be decontaminated when he returned. Even so, as he retrieved the Last Wall while manhandling the Inquisitor back up the service ramp, Damanov appeared to be reaching for something within the confines of his environmental suit. He was subtle about it, but Alyxander missed nothing. No Imperial Fist worthy of the black mailed gauntlet ever did. 

Without warning the chaplain threw Damanov straight down. Not dropped. Threw. The Inquisitor made the mistake of trying to catch himself, blowing out both knees and ankles upon impact. No matter how insulated the suit was, the hard crunch of bone could still be heard whip-sharp. Damanov was howling now. 

Whatever he had been trying to grab also went spinning across the floor. It was a pin laser. The sort that could dig a hole through anything. It might have hurt, if Damanov had managed to hit anything important. Alyxander stamped it flat without a word then hefted his battered shield. With careful precision, he kicked the wailing Inquisitor flat on his back and slowly laid the Last Wall upon him. The screaming grew louder, choked with the visceral gurgle of blood and phlegm as it was laid nearly flush across his torso. Yet the chaplain was very careful to only extrude enough pressure to maim, not kill. 

“Where are the relics?”

At first Damanov did not speak. A hollow wheeze sounded from under the faceplate at first, followed by a rough, painful hacking. “Wh-what?”

“The relics. The ones you stole from the Imperial Fists.”

“Th-those are heirlooms! They were...given to me.” He gasped as Alyxander held back just enough for him to take a full breath. “Damn you, those have been in my family for generations! Since the Heresy! They’ve been in my chambers since they were placed there millenia ago. I stole nothing!”

Slowly, the chaplain leaned in close. This was a difficult effort between his kneeling stance, holding the shield against Damanov’s body, and the restrictions of his armor. Nonetheless, the effect was there. He could not see the Inquisitor’s eyes, but he could hear the man’s breathing become suspiciously quiet. 

“So you were aware of whom they belonged to.” It was not a question. “It matters not if you inherited these relics, the fact of the matter is your forefathers should not have owned these items in the first place. You knew all of this, and continued to keep them. Even had them restored. Your forefather condemned you the moment they were taken from Dorn to be used as decorations for your inheritance.”

“Wait! Wait!” Damanov’s pleading was cut short. Relief came when the Last Wall was peeled away from his torso only to be replaced by a worse agony when Alyxander began to drag him across the floor by both shattered ankles...

\------

Constance peeled her eyes open with a slow gasp. She had drifted off waiting for Alyxander back in the reliquary. A mere five hours after she’d been dismissed. The silent chapter serf who had collected her just outside the confessional had to reverse direction and swing her back around at some equally silent command. By then they’d been walking for three hours and had to jog to return in just two. Damn him, there was only so much fatigue her augmented limbs could stave off.

After ten minutes of waiting at the same table, in the same chair, she’d put her head in her arms and went to sleep. 

But there was no Alyxander there to wake her up with a barked word. Just darkness and the quiet wheeze of ancient air scrubbers. Then her fingers closed around an object she expected to be her recording device, but found to be a large coin instead. It was cold and vaguely wet. Constance squinted through the gloom, feeling the weight of it in her hands. Brass. Heavy and stamped with a coiling, thalassophile thing she simply had no words for. Immediately she began to feel sick, slamming her hands on the table. The coin, still in her palm, rang eerily. 

“Damn it, Buphegohl!” 

Her words, too, rang just as eerily. Nothing replied. The silence stretched on. The sickness in her gut grew stronger to the point where she wasn’t sure if she was going to vomit or panic. 

“Answer me!” Constance gagged, dragging herself out of the chair to finally heave. With an empty stomach, all that left her mouth was mucus laced drool, abnormally salty and thick. Like slime.

That’s when she saw it. One of the only springs of color aside from yellow and gold in the otherwise dark and drab chamber. Blue was not a color she’d seen at all in the reliquary. It did not belong here, let alone as a statue of Dorn. It was easy to miss at first, shrouded in so much dust and ash it looked like weathered sandstone. 

Yet the moment she noticed it was out of place was the moment it moved. Vode shed his disguise of grime and stepped off the plinth, replacing his stoney visage with a cruel, uncanny smile. He gave her no time to scream or run. One second he was a sapphire clad warrior, the next he was a shrieking raptor with terrifying, flat black eyes and shimmering golden feathers. Arkio. He bore her to the flagstones in a flash of onyx talons. Constance braced for an impact that never came. The floor was not there. Her back splashed down into depthless, tenebrous waters. Arkio, or Vode, chattered loudly in apparent surprise, talons scrambling across her body, trying to find purchase on something even as he and his victim continued to plunge ever downward. Whatever weak light the reliquary offered long since vanished. 

Except he wasn’t alone. The thing tore at Constance in his efforts to keep hold of her even as he felt...shapes brush past. As smooth as silk and as round and thick as an oil drum. So horribly, horribly long. Wings that were never meant to swim beat frantically, trying to power him upwards but his feathers were heavy, weighed down by saline and the caresses of biting microfauna. He needed no air yet water rushed into his lungs as if he were drowning. Still the silken tubes of meat continued to roll past his body. 

Coiling. 

Centching. 

Clenching. 

Crushing.

The agony came suddenly and it was like the scrape of diamond sharp sandpaper drawn endlessly across his flesh as coils snapped shut, ripping away feathers and skin. Then muscle. All the way down to the bone. His body dissolved, stung by salt and the relentless mouths of tiny, parasitic creatures it could not even see. Struggling was useless. The more he tried to move the tighter the coils became and the more he was flayed raw. 

The last thing he saw was a shadow. A shape. Vaguely sapien but monumental in size, drifting through the gloom. The Warden had come for him.

Then Buphegohl peeled away the false thing’s flesh until only the human remained. Once this man had been known as Inquisitor Steele, although that name and title was now a sore joke. The Warden let him drown. There was no death to be had in Limbo, but the soul remembers well. Steele could be there, holding his throat with feet desperately kicking water for ages and he would never die. Nor would he reach the surface, for there was no surface at all. The waters existed purely inside of the mind of The Warden, locked away. Buphegohl only unleashed them when he had a victim to catch. It had been a long, long time indeed. 

The waters of the Styx slowly retreated, however. He could only sustain them for a brief period, but it was always enough. Brine washed out of his armor in stinging gushes, dyed red with Steele’s blood...and that of the woman. 

Constance slid from his back in a boneless heap. The argent gleam of her exposed skeleton had become soft and slimy. Her skin, puffy and utterly featureless. The same as the membranes of any deepwater fish. Crustaceans and worse things besides crept under her soaking dress, picking at her hair and face. Bupheghol found himself impressed. He had driven the Inquisitor through the headwaters of the Styx, dragging the woman along with the body stealer purely on accident. Quite frankly she shouldn't have survived. 

At his feet Steele laid open, peeled and raw, weeping brine from where his eyes used to be. Lengths of rusted chains kept Steele's waterlogged body bound to him as the tentacles hidden within Buphegohl’s armor retreated. Steele squealed like a stuck swine as Buphegohl turned and took a step. The Warden instead pulled Constance from the ash. She made no sound at all, salt water sluicing from her dress in a flood. Had she not gotten away from the Inquisitor and clung to him with such marsupial strength her fate would have been worse. As it was her soul was still mostly in one piece. 

He might actually apologize for using a recreation of her memories to lure Steele out of hiding. Buphegohl could not say he didn’t enjoy it, but it was also the only way. Hijacking Vode’s slaughtered body at the moment of the Inquisitor’s own death in Reality had been the perfect move. Steele avoided damnation at the hands of his demon master while managing to avoid imprisonment in Tartarus. Becoming a noble shell with a rotten, rotten core. 

Had he continued with this disguise the Warden might have missed him. Instead, he’d decided he was hungry. Preying on Constance’s vulnerable form. Stealing her memories of when she was Vigilance to further his lie. Their shared ties with Mephiston was not a coincidence indeed. 

But that was over now. Buphegohl began to walk, dragging the whimpering thing behind him with a rattle of chains. For the woman who was once Vigilance in life, now Constance once more in death, he heaved her over one shoulder like a sack of grain. 

Perhaps Zeruel, Guardian of the Cedar Forest, could do something with her. 

\------

A red pin light blinked urgently from the lambent gloom of a scantily occupied hanger. The first to see it was a son of Mannus, once shamed by his chapter, now famed as a hero that dared go beyond the steel. He dropped the tool he’d been using and stared for a moment. Helm lenses flickered in what might have been a blink, had he organic eyes to do so with. The device from which the red pin light originated should not have been on. 

Whatever thoughts the captain had been processing moments before were immediately filed away, shouldering passed hulking stacks of equipment and raw materials. More of the same went tumbling off the bench they sat upon as the Scion of Mars pushed them aside. It was a hololith. One that was used for one specific purpose and one specific purpose only.

Valdek’s power fist, a weapon as big as a man, thumped mightily against the bench. The hololith and everything within ten feet, jumped as if each object had legs. 

“Brel!”

So called, another hulking figure stamped away from where he was hunched over his own repairs, almost entirely hidden by the bulk of a Corvus Blackstar. If Valdek could be called huge, Brel was simply massive. And unusual. Even the Scion of Mars appeared to be less augmented and Valdek wasn’t even human anymore. At least, not in body. If he were to use an archaic if slightly inaccurate term, Valdek would be called cyborg. Brel, however, seemed to prefer a more inhuman appearance. Exemplified by possessing the massive mechanical legs of a raptor. Digitigrade and mightily armored. 

“Valdek?” Asked the other, signaling his approach by the sound of his steel claws clicking loudly against the decking. 

The Scion of Mars shook his helm. “It’s Vigilance. She’s triggered the emergency line.”

Brel froze. Thick armatures and servo arms that marked him out as a techmarine of the Deathwatch whirled and lifted the device from its bench. Valdek laid the arm not totally taken up by a power fist upon the other’s pauldron. “Not here.”

Brel seemed to agree, eyes glassy with moisture. “How would we even begin to reach her?”

“Lord Guilliman found a way before, we can do it again.” Valdek paused. His voice was entirely vox cast, yet more emotion bled from it than most Astartes would have considered appropriate. “He will...want to know about this.”

“I hope so. Would he approve of a search and rescue through the rift?”

“He must. If Lord Guilliman doesn’t…” Valdek hesitated. “I would still take the risk of disobedience to find her.”

“We will take the risk.” Brel corrected, fondly pressing his bare forehead to the other’s helm. “We made Vigilance a promise. We will keep it.”

“So it shall be, brother. Together.” 

“Together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credits are as follows!
> 
> Brel belongs to my friend Kin, who also owns Elysmaldus, Damos and Bellerion.
> 
> Buphegohl and the mentioned Zeruel belong to my friend Brion who also helped me with proof reading along with Kin.
> 
> Alyxander belongs to my friend Cawl and he helped me with technical feedback. 
> 
> Valdek belongs to my friend Stompy who will be providing some commissioned artwork soon as well!
> 
> And thank you for reading this chapter. If you want, feel free to leave a comment with feedback! Remember, wear a mask, get your vaccines, wash your hands and keep socially distanced. Stay safe!

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you like it! Credits and thank yous are as above. Each chapter here will be released alongside chapters from To Serve and will highlight scenes from both in another perspective. 
> 
> Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts!


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